As a retired mathematical physicist;I enjoy gambling via KENO(gaming is the circumlocution)
i.e until lately Why?The casinos in Arizona have changed the house odds.A five spot true odds are about 1024/ 1 .The house pays 820/1 .You can compute the house percentage.Recently I visited the casino and patiently invested in a 25 cents /card 4 card 5 spot. After investing about $350.00 I finally hit a five spot and pressed the payout button for my ticket.To my suprise the ticket did not pay 820 quarters. Instead of 820 quarters the payout was 160 quarters($40.00)
Summary: The managment insisted they had the right to change payouts anytime and I should have read the payout tables(which did show the reduced payouts)
My questions is to readers :I can document worse ripoffs than this one;in my opinion the casinos are out of control-in fact under no real control
Anyone else want to put a stop to this corruption!

By boycotting casinos and KENO. I will never, ever play KENO at a casino, Indian or not.

Of course, I never have before, and I have absolutely no interest in doing so, so it's not really a stretch.

(Seriously, dude, you understand it's completely voluntary, right? No one made you go play KENO. They documented their right to make changes, and they documented the changes. Ya got no leg to stand on.)

A guy I work with goes to his local club on Monday nights to watch the football. He and his wife have dinner and watch the game. He is happy to spend $50. Dinner and drinks costs $38 and he puts the other $12 on Keno and after the games are played he goes and collects whatever he gets. A few weeks ago they arrived early for dinner and the football wasn't over when his games finished so he reinvested the few dollars he got back in more Keno and went back to watch the second half.

One of the club staff came up to him later to ask whether he had a Keno ticket because, "Keno say that someone here has won $10,000 and no-one has claimed it." Turned out he had the winner. He was only one number off $1.2million.

I'm sorry, but I'll have to go with the trolling the boards theory. Any one who plays keno because they think the odds are favorable it is too stupid to draw breath, much less be a mathematical physicist. Vegas was built on the backs of people bad at math.

Before your next game of keno anywhere, I recommend crumpling your money and building a bonfire. You get the same value, and it'll keep you warm during the cold desert nights.

I'm sorry, but I'll have to go with the trolling the boards theory. Any one who plays keno because they think the odds are favorable it is too stupid to draw breath, much less be a mathematical physicist. Vegas was built on the backs of people bad at math.

Since the OP explicitly says, " five spot true odds are about 1024/ 1 .The house pays 820/1," I rather doubt he "thinks the odds are favorable."

Keno is just lotto. The odds are ridiculous. The only time I play is at a bleary-eyed breakfast in Vegas, when they have Keno Girls walking around the room. THAT can be fun, if you're half in the bag...

I, for one, will play my part by neither knowing, nor caring what the hell this is all about.

Keno is a game of chance that IMO is pretty fun to play live and boring as shit on a machine, though obviously that's just one girl's opinion. You're given a card with numbered boxes, 1 to 80, and you pick the numbers you think will come in, mark them out, and take your card to the Keno cage. You pay a fee per card per game (usually 50 cents or a dollar). There's a big air bubbler with 80 numbered balls in it -- like you see when they pick numbers for a lottery. The Keno caller pulls 20 random balls and posts those numbers; you drink your beer and follow along, hoping to hit all of your numbers. If you hit a certain number, you win. The amount you win depends on the number of spots you played and the number of spots you hit (play 6, hit 4; play 8, hit 7; etc.). The pay-out for each is set by the casino and is listed on a little card that is right on the table.

(On a machine, you pick your numbers on a virtual card on the screen, hit the button and the random numbers pop in -- whee.)

Keno is not a great odds game (meaing your chances of winning), or a great edge game (meaning, low edge to the casino if you do win). In addition to charging a fee to play per game, the casino also takes a cut of the winnings when they set their payouts. There is no legal requirement that the payout be set at any particular level, and as the Wiki article shows, the house edge can run from about 5% (decent) to over 65% (complete screwage of the players).

The OP'er is bitching that he doesn't like the payout at the casino he was playing in, despite the fact that he admits the payout was shown on a pay-out table he presumably could see and read before he played.

The remedy there is to go to a different casino or play a different game, not to complain that you got screwed by playing a game with bad odds and known shitty payout.

As for why you probably got lower odds than usual, Indian casinos are generally in an area where there is significantly less competition for your gambling dollar than a place like Las Vegas. Their demand is likely pretty inelastic and they can set odds at whatever they want and people will still gamble because they're the only show in town.

Not sure about Arizona with Vegas just across the state line, but thats how things are around here.

I'm no mathematical physicist, but I think of investing as putting your money where you have a reasonable chance of having it increase in value. Gambling is entertainment, or (cynically) "Throwing your money away in the vain hope that you will get it back".

I went on a family trip to Vegas once with my mom and three brothers. The first evening, we sat down in a casino's restaurant where they had Keno slips on the table. One of my brothers had never seen this before, and started asking about it.

I explained how it was played, and that it was one of the biggest sucker bets in the casino...there was a reason that they plied you with the slips at dinner. My brother, however, was not dissuaded...he wanted to play. Uh uh, no way, no how was I going to let him toss away perfectly good money like that. He filled out his slip, but I snatched it away from him before he could turn it in to our waitress.

Naturally, my sticking my nose into his foolishness cost him a $750 win. Can't say that I blame him for never letting me live that one down...

As for why you probably got lower odds than usual, Indian casinos are generally in an area where there is significantly less competition for your gambling dollar than a place like Las Vegas. Their demand is likely pretty inelastic and they can set odds at whatever they want and people will still gamble because they're the only show in town.

Not sure about Arizona with Vegas just across the state line, but thats how things are around here.

I tend to agree. Gambling around Albuquerque tends to be decent, because there's enough casinos in a small enough area (about an hour's drive or 60-75 miles) for there to be competition and you can find some pretty decent gambling. Go to a place like Ruidoso, though, where the Mescalero Apaches have the only game in town and it starts to look more like the Vegas Strip does these days: high minimums and lousy odds.

As for why you probably got lower odds than usual, Indian casinos are generally in an area where there is significantly less competition for your gambling dollar than a place like Las Vegas. Their demand is likely pretty inelastic and they can set odds at whatever they want and people will still gamble because they're the only show in town.

Not sure about Arizona with Vegas just across the state line, but thats how things are around here.

Depends on the area. Some places are more tightly controlled. The New Jersey Casino Control Commission sets the minimum odds on all games and machines. The individual casinos can make the odds better than the minimum (hence all the billboards for "voted #1 for hottest slots!) but they can't go below the minimum.

I'm sorry, but I'll have to go with the trolling the boards theory. Any one who plays keno because they think the odds are favorable it is too stupid to draw breath, much less be a mathematical physicist. Vegas was built on the backs of people bad at math.

Before your next game of keno anywhere, I recommend crumpling your money and building a bonfire. You get the same value, and it'll keep you warm during the cold desert nights.

People who make a living gambling do it by taking money away from fellow players. Virtually no one makes money at the house's expense on a regular basis. Sure, getting lucky once can give you a big payoff, but over time, the house wins. Playing games which pit the players against each other instead of the player against the house, or some sort of mechanical randomness(like slots or roulette or keno) is about the only chance you've got to turn skill into money in the gambling world.

Not sure about Arizona with Vegas just across the state line, but thats how things are around here.

The Indian Casinos in Arizona are clustered around the big population centers, Phoenix and Tucson. Las Vegas is about six hours away by car from Phoenix and Laughlin NV not much closer. Tucson you can add two hours to that. Therefore the "only game in town" syndrome is as much in force here as, say, Connecticut.

At least with keno -- and poker -- machines you've got the payouts listed. On reel slot machines you cannot know how much the machine retains. The casino I worked in years ago got a new bank of dollar slots with a big sign over them, "98% payback!!" and they were. Three months later we took down the sign and changed the chips in machines from 98% to 92% payback. The payouts on the belly glass were not changed.

Curious, I compared the stop tables between the two percentages for the Red White and Blue game, the most popular in all of Nevada at the time. The RWB game has single, double and triple bars for minor payouts and red/white/blue sevens for the bigger payouts, one of each color per reel. The difference was subtle. The tighter machine had on reel 1, one double bar replaced by a blank, and on reel 3, one triple bar replaced by a blank. Reel 2 was the same in both. That was out of 64 stops per reel, a small difference indeed.

It seems like the house would want to stop this: More money for the small-time pros means less take for them. There are only so many pigeons.

No the house loves this. As long as they get to host the game. Then they can earn their money with a rake off the top of the pot without worrying about someone getting lucky and hitting it big. As with all games the casino earns their money on the vig, they don't count on everyone losing all their money.

Wow - I can't believe this - the two saddest "pit" threads I have ever read are on the board simultaneously. Reading about people who have to sell their SUV's left me feeling saddened, crestfallen and morose. Then I learn about someone's traumatic experience at an Indian casino.
These are truly sad times in which we live.

My questions is to readers :I can document worse ripoffs than this one;in my opinion the casinos are out of control-in fact under no real control
Anyone else want to put a stop to this corruption!

Well I am equally outraged.
Maybe it would be a nice gesture to give them back their country? We can start with your house perhaps?

ASAKMOTSD

Quote:

Where was the Indian Casino - in Bangalore or Mumbai?

Yes, I'm sure just about everyone here at the SDMB is aware the proper term is Native American. However, even though the OP preferred using the insensitive and politically incorrect "Indian", I didn't think it warranted correction, considering the harrowing emotional and financial trauma he has undergone.